The Common Information Model (CIM) is an open standard that defines how managed components within an information technology (IT) environment are represented as a common set of objects, and also defines relationships among these managed components. The CIM is intended to allow consistent management of such components, independent of their manufacturer or provider. By using CIM implementations, management software can be written once to work with many implementations without complex and costly conversion operations or loss of information as components are added to or removed from an IT environment. The CIM standard is defined and published by the Distributed Management Task Force (DTMF), Inc., of Portland, Oreg., which maintains an Internet presence at the uniform resource locator (URL) address www.dmtf.org.
A CIM agent retrieves data relating to CIM managed components, from the CIM managed components, and to send this data to CIM consumers when requested. This data may include performance statistics, health, configuration and other information that may be of interest to ascertain that a CIM managed component is operating properly, or to otherwise monitor the CIM managed component. A CIM consumer is any type of application that receives this data for such purposes. For instance, a CIM consumer may be management software, another type of computer program or client, and so on.
The data propagation path between a CIM agent and a CIM consumer is typically one way—in response to data requests sent to the CIM agent from a CIM consumer, data is propagated by the CIM agent to the CIM consumer and received by the CIM consumer from the CIM agent. The CIM consumer, however, is unable to notify the CIM agent that the data relating to a CIM managed component and received from the CIM agent contains errors; that is, the CIM consumer is unable to propagate such relevant data back to the CIM agent. As such, the CIM agent is unable to automatically and without manual user interaction initiate an automated recovery process by which the CIM agent can attempt to discern the cause of these errors, and/or otherwise acquire additional information that may shed light on the cause of the errors.
Rather, within the prior art, the CIM consumer can at best alert a user like a system administrator. Upon receiving the alert, the system administrator can manually force the CIM agent to perform a recovery process. This manual interaction by a user, however, can be inconvenient and time-consuming. For example, the user may not be able to ascertain the cause of the errors without first forcing the CIM agent to acquire additional information and then waiting for this additional information to be acquired. As another example, the window of time in which pertinent information regarding the CIM agent can be used to determine why the CIM consumer is reporting an error can be relatively short; as such, manual intervention by a system administrator may not occur quickly enough to capture the pertinent information. As a third example, the recovery process may be relatively trivial, such that the user's time and focus are wasted in having to manually initiate this process.
For these and other reasons, there is a need for the present invention.